The R word – just a bit of fun!

I had to go into town today to drop off a passport application at the post office. On the way back to the High Street to get the bus back to work, I passed a little independent card and gift shop which always has nice things and which I find very difficult to go past. It’s possible I even took that route back to the bus stop to pass the shop. There are racks of greetings cards outside and because I always like to have a couple of cards in reserve, I always have a look. Imagine my surprise when I was confronted with this. Now because I’ve often gone into that shop, and often spent money in there, and had many conversations with the staff, I feel as though I know them. So I thought I knew what was going to happen next. Here’s what I imagined. Me: Look what’s in your card rack. Them: Good heavens, how did that get there? Thanks so much for pointing it out, we’ll remove these from display immediately. Job done! How wrong I was. As luck would have it, the proprietor of the shop was behind the counter. She told me that she was in charge of buying their stock, that she had deliberately chosen to stock this card, that the card used the R word in a humorous way, that she believed people who bought the card were seeing this use of the R word as humorous, and that although she was sorry I was offended, that she really couldn’t see anything wrong with the card. I didn’t sense that she was actually sorry at all; what I sensed was that she thought I was a humourless misery, and probably suffering from an overdose of political correctness.

I know that the English language has absorbed, and taken some of the the sting out of, words like “idiot” and “moron”, and maybe there’s an argument that the same is true for the R word. But many people that I know and respect, who work tirelessly for people who might attract that nasty epithet, assure me that the R word is still full of meaning and real live hurtfulness.

It also seems such an odd way to go about choosing cards to sell. Given how many millions of designs there must be, why choose one which uses a word which you must know perfectly well has the potential to offend? It reminds me of the peculiar people who insist that gollies are just harmless old-fashioned dolls, and that anyone who feels offended by them is suffering from PC Gorn Mad. I do also wonder if the proprietor of the shop would have chosen to stock the card if she had a family member to whom the epithet might be applied. Would she be so happy to continue to promulgate the view that using the R word is just a bit of fun if she’d heard it applied to someone she cares for?